Officer.com Police Blogs & Podcasts

Tim Dees
Editor-in-Chief
Officer.com

Kevin Davis, who is Officer.com’s Tactical Survival contributor, explores in his column (The Inside Game) this month the problem with internal politics and the stress it creates for police officers. He makes an observation that, about ten years ago, things changed from a climate where supervisors acted as mentors to their officers and guided them to become better and more professional, to a situation where supervisors only act when they need to do so in order to protect their own career aspirations. Any similar aspirations of the officer involved become irrelevant.

Kevin didn’t start his career in policing all that long after I did, and he works in a different agency, different state, and different part of the country than what I am accustomed to. Maybe that’s the way it is (or was) in his part of the world. But I think it’s far more likely that things haven’t changed all that much during my career, or Kevin’s, or that of anyone else that’s been a cop in the last fifty years or so.

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Tim Dees
Editor-in-Chief
Officer.com

Maybe I’m oversensitive, but experiences in the last few months have given me cause to reconsider the practice of carrying a concealed firearm. A few have come up in just past few days. First, there was the nutcase in the Salt Lake City shopping mall that decided to pass his evening by gunning down anyone he happened to see. Off-duty Ogden PD Officer Ken Hammond was dining there with his wife when the festivities began. He sent his wife to a place of relative safety, and engaged the gunman with his concealed weapon until the cavalry could arrive. It appears from news reports that Hammond didn’t kill Sulejmen Talovic, but he kept him distracted long enough to keep any more citizens from being killed. Having caps popped at your head whenever you stick it up will do that.

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Tim Dees
Editor-in-Chief
Officer.com

First, thanks to all of you who remembered me in your prayers for a safe trip across the northern states to Washington. I made it in one piece, even if my windshield didn’t, owing to a airborne rock somewhere in North Dakota. But windshields can be replaced, and this one has been already. My life is still in cardboard boxes, but that’s a temporary situation, too.

There has been such an embarrassment of riches for those of us that watch and pundit the criminal justice system. Two incidents from last week come to mind, though, because they intersect on the same issue. First, a woman in Tampa reported that she had been raped, and wound up in jail after she was found to have outstanding arrest warrants in her name. This was aggravated when a jail employee refused to dispense the second dose of a morning-after pill because the procedure conflicted with her religious beliefs.

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